= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
wedrifid comments on Advancing Certainty - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (108)
I'm not sure this properly represents what I was thinking. We all agree that any decision procedure that leads you to play the lottery is flawed. But the "million equivalent statement" test seems to indicate that you can't have sufficient confidence of not winning not to play given the payoffs. If you insist on independent reasoning, passing the million-statement test is even harder, and justifying not playing is therefore harder. It's a kind of real-life Pascal's mugging.
I don't have a solution to Pascal's mugging, but for the lottery, I'm inclined to think that I really can have 10^-8 confidence of not winning, that the flaw is with the million-statement test, and it's simply that there aren't a million disparate situations where you can have this kind of confidence, though there certainly are a million broadly similar situations in the reference class "we are actually in a strong position to calculate high-quality odds on this coming to pass".
I don't.
Can you please explain that further? Why not? Do you just mean that the pleasure of buying the ticket could be worth a dollar, even though you know you won't win?
Just reasoning based on a non linear relationship between money and utility.
Winning ten million dollars provides less than ten million times the utility of winning one dollar, because the richer you are, the less difference each additional dollar makes. That seems to argue against playing the lottery, though.
$5,000,000 debt. Bankruptcy laws.
Very clever! You're right; that is a situation where you might as well play the lottery.
This actually comes up in business, in terms of the types of investments that businesses make when they have a good chance of going bankrupt. They may not play the lottery, but they're likely to make riskier moves since they have very little to lose and a lot to gain.
It also applies if you believe your company will be bailed out by the government. I don't tend to approve of bank bailouts for this reason. (Although government guarantees for deposits I place in a different category.)